December 25, 2003

Several generations stopped by to wish us well.

A number of our Zababdeh friends stopped by to bid us farewell.

Merry Christmas! This morning we worshiped with the Orthodox faithful in Zababdeh, shared lunch with good friends, and then spent the rest of the day at home, as friends and neighbors came by to wish us good-bye. It was a good way to accomplish the hard task of saying farewell to a whole village.

As the evening progressed, our driver for tomorrow morning called to tell us about another suicide bombing. He apologized that because of the bombing, he could not take us from Zababdeh across the Green Line and to the Jordanian border: "Because of the bombing they'll close the checkpoint. I'll be able to get out because I have Israeli citizenship [he's from Nazareth], but they won't let me back in to be with my wife and baby son." So we were faced with a real question of how to get out tomorrow. Marthame made a flurry of calls, and found a driver - another Palestinian Israeli living in the West Bank, but one willing to take the risk of not getting back home again. That solved (or as solved as we'd get tonight) we went on enjoying the evening with our visitors.

Fr. Aktham, Deacon Imad, and the French teacher Veronique were our final visitors, and we shared a lovely time of warm fuzzies, appreciation, laughs, encouragement (and some deserved berating for not sharing lunch with them and the sisters today). After some last minute packing (including finding space for a number of farewell gifts brought by people today), we collapsed at a very late, small hour.